


Partnership

by lodessa



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Fade to Black, Fake Marriage, Friends With Benefits, Implied Sexual Content, Making Out, Mild Sexual Content, Relationship Discussions, Undercover as Married, Undressing, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 22:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15592371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: She had thought… well it sounds unimaginably unselfaware and naive now, but Katrina really had thought that it would be simpler to do this with Gabriel than someone else, that their particular brand of friendship and its familiarity with the bedroom would make it less tense and simpler to pretend to be a married couple.Of course, therein lay the problem.  It was one thing to share whiskey and sex, to tumble carelessly into bed, and another entirely to set up house and call one another pet names in front of the neighbors and go through a mundane daily routine of skincare and toothbrushing beside one another at a double sink vanity.





	Partnership

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [LizBee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizBee/pseuds/LizBee) in the [july2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/july2018) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> Katrina and Gabriel go undercover as a married couple. Shenanigans ensue, I assume. (Pre-series, so prime characters all around, please.)

“I think Tenvir is this close to letting me in on where he’s getting those black market cigars,” Gabriel comments, bending over to splash water on his face. 

She continues to watch him as he pats his face dry with a towel and takes a moment to survey the day’s stubble in the mirror. He’s not the skinny kid she’d debated across the lecture hall of their Intro to Diplomacy course anymore: his shoulders have filled out, he’s grown into his features, and she can see the small lines starting to form at the corners of his eyes and mouth… she has them too.

Both of them have grown so much since the fresh faced cadets they had been at the beginning. Word has it that Gabriel is on the shortlist to get his own ship in the next year or so and Katrina has finally let them coax her away from the couch and into management. She’s even accepted that she likes it, that maybe it is where she was meant to be. 

They haven’t seen each other all that much these past five years or so, but it's finally hitting her that for all this time when they do they have still been repeating their same old pattern, acting like their twenty year old selves. 

Why? Of course, she knows the literature on it, but it's funny just how useless one’s expertise gathered to help others feels when it suddenly is relevant to one’s self.

Why is she so attached to Gabriel and their little dance? Maybe she misses the version of herself that started this, the girl who didn’t know better, not really. If she retreats back into habit with him she gets to be her again, even if just for a little while. She knows that’s an evasion, though, a half truth.

Because these past few weeks, working with him, living with him… not just as friends who happen to enjoy sleeping together but as actual partners… That is powerful.

They have always been powerful. Aligned or in opposition they magnify each other, act as a clarifying force. A good argument with Gabriel can make her more effective and focused than agreement and collaboration with almost anyone else. Katrina thinks it is because of how well they understand one another, perhaps better than anyone else… even themselves. There’s a invigorating power to being seen and she and Gabriel have always been able to cut right through to the core, past all the surface level layers they engage with others on, at least that’s how it feels for her. It is an irony that it is still true, given how out of date and stagnant their interactions have been for years. 

This assignment, going undercover as a married couple to see whether the rumors about what was going on here on this colony were true, hasn’t been difficult because they are miscommunicating or not working well together. It isn’t hard doing this. 

No. It is the reverse. 

It is easy. It is too easy for them to slip into these roles, for them to fall into sync. That is the real true terror of it all, the thing that has her feeling queasy and ill at ease.

“Penny for your thoughts? I swear you went somewhere just now, Kat.”

Katrina pulls herself out of her own head, setting down the hairbrush she’s been holding in the same spot for who knows how long and seating herself on the counter between their respective sinks. 

She never imagined this kind of domesticity for them, but now it’s not a matter of imagining. They are living it, even if it’s supposed to be pretense, even if it’s for a mission. Watching… feeling them slide into this kind of partnership, which doesn’t feel like a lie no matter how much they spent the first day or two cracking jokes like it was ridiculous. 

“It’s,” she ponders how she could possibly summarize it all to him, what his response would be, “I’m sorry Gabriel I did get lost in my thoughts for a moment.”

Has he not thought about it, or is he aware but just less preoccupied with the implications?

“Was I in there anywhere?” he says soft and low, with that rough hewn charm that made her breath catch originally. 

She’d been nineteen, bright, outspoken, and prone to overthinking. He’d been the first three but definitely not the last one. He wasn’t the first person to make her heart pound or really the first in any of those usual ways. He was just someone who saw her for who she was not some phantom in his head and didn’t think he could change that or walk away because he couldn’t. 

A lot of things have changed over the years, youthful indecision has mostly left her in the face of experience and necessity and he’s become less impulsive and more calculating for much the same reasons, but he still knows how to charm her and she still can be herself around him.

“You always think everything is about you,” she shakes her head and shoves his shoulder playfully, and he catches her hand and turns it over, kissing his way up the inside, offering her the easy escape he’s always been.

Maybe that’s what she’s so attached to, the way they leave everyday life behind when they take off their clothes, the way that can put her out of the orbit of everything that’s going on for a little while. 

“Not everything,” he counters lazily, moving closer to come stand right in front of her, hands on either side of her hips, “But you obviously weren’t thinking about the mission.”

For a moment, she just enjoys: The way he kisses her neck: scratchy face and all. The feeling of his chest pressing closer to hers, bare skin warm through her thin cotton nightgown. The dip between his hips as her hands come to rest just below the waistband of his pajama pants. 

“It’s too easy,” she finally sighs regretfully. It is one thing for this to be a respite from work and the rest of the world. It is another thing for her to use sex with Gabriel to avoid dealing with her worries about the two of them. She’s not that much of a traitor to her field.

“The mission?” he barely seems to give his response consideration as he shifts one of her straps to press his lips to that spot on her shoulder, “It has been a cakewalk hasn’t it? Kinda like command sent us on a mandatory vacation, isn’t it?”

He’s not wrong, but they haven’t gotten to why it has her shaken up just yet. It shouldn’t be this easy, should it? She knows that they are playing at marriage, but at the same time there’s something about the comfortable feeling of being domestic with him, the way he replicated the right strain of potatoes for her family recipe without being told, the easy way his arm hangs over her shoulder as they sit on the couch talking to the neighbors after dinner. There’s even something about the way they got through the debacle where the shower stopped working and they had to spend three hours repairing it.

“It does feel like that,” she takes a moment to try to compose a coherent explanation, leaning back away slightly and moving her hands to his shoulders.

“Why do you make that sound like a bad thing? I thought we were having fun.” There’s an edge of sulkiness to Gabriel’s voice, like she’s being a spoilsport, and in a way he isn’t wrong… it’s just not for the reason he’s implying.

“We are. I just… Do you ever think that we’re enjoying this too much, Gabriel? That we slid into playing at domestic bliss a little too easily.”

He looks at her with those penetrating blue eyes, shifting from being playful to realize she’s being serious.

“What’s on your mind, Kat. Really? Because I feel like it isn’t just guilt about having fun on duty. After all, that’s never bothered you before.”

Out of everyone she knows, he is the best at bringing out a little recklessness in her. She thinks back on all the times they took risks, not just at the academy but during the two years they ended up stationed together when they were lieutenants. 

This is a different kind of risk, one that neither of them has ever been prone to flirting with, maybe with other people, but not when it comes to each other. What are friends who don’t tell each other the truth though? What value do they have as friends, if she’s not going to be honest?

“We’ve chosen to never define ourselves as anything beyond friends. It’s worked well for us all these years, and I can’t help feeling like doing this makes a mockery of that.”

Last week he cheesily called her his _leopardess_ and she responded in kind by referring to him as _my own personal archangel_ a little too easily. It is more than that, though. Really, it goes back to the first night… when they locked eyes across the bed and for a moment Kat felt that boundary, the barrier of couple as opposed to casual sex… a strange phrasing as really wasn’t the dynamic between a stable established couple more casual than any other when it came to this? Semantics aside, there was a moment, when her chest tightened and her stomach dropped and she could have just rolled over and turned out the light or she could have picked up the book on her nightstand and he could have done the same, but instead he licked his lips and smirked and commented that he hoped she didn’t _have a headache_ and she laughed and pulled him down on top of her. In so many ways it wasn’t any different from any number of other nights, but she had felt that boundary and known it was anyway and she’d chosen to cross that line.

“You chose me for this,” Gabriel points out, raising his eyebrows that way he does that conveys a weird mixture of feeling and certainly.

She did choose this, choose to do this mission with him, choose to do it this way. She had thought… well it sounds unimaginably unselfaware and naive now, but Katrina really had thought that it would be simpler to do this with Gabriel than someone else, that their particular brand of friendship and its familiarity with the bedroom would make it less tense and simpler to pretend to be a married couple. There wouldn’t be any tension about whether underlying attraction was playing into the pretense required, any unease at the intimacy of living in such close quarters. She’d figured there wouldn’t be any of the awkwardness, after all who knew each other better than they did?

Of course, therein lay the problem. It was one thing to share whiskey and sex, to tumble carelessly into bed, and another entirely to set up house and call one another pet names in front of the neighbors and go through a mundane daily routine of skincare and toothbrushing beside one another at a double sink vanity. 

“I know,” she swallows deeply. She’s the one who put them in this position and now she’s the one having an emotional crisis about it. “I did, and I think I have to own that, at least to myself. I wasn’t going to bring you into it, but you asked so I-”

“Maybe you should bring me into it, after all, doesn’t us involve me?”

Somehow he’s smiling and that should make it worse, or maybe make her angry, but it’s not that kind of smile and that’s not the way things work with him.

“Of course it does… but my own feelings are…” 

Her feelings are confusing. Or maybe the feelings aren’t, but trying to sort out their relevance is.

“It doesn’t surprise me that we can do this so easily,” he says with that definitiveness she is certain those under him find hard to question, “When I call us friends, I don’t think that’s a lie because that’s what we are first but there’s nothing just about us.”

“I didn’t mean to downplay-” 

“You are the best and closest friend I have in the world, Kat. Sometimes I have no idea why you still put up with me, with this. I keep expecting that next time I see you, you’ll tell me you’re getting married or something, but I know you’d still be the person I can count on to call me on my bullshit when I need it, but to have my back. We’ve always had each other’s backs, haven’t we?”

They have. Its one reason she’s never felt the need to reexamine things between them. She knows that without the sex they’d still be something. 

“We have. I trust you, Gabriel, not to be right but to be righteous, to do right as you reckon it.”

They argue and they debate and they let too long go by without talking, but he’s one person she never has to _manage _.__

__“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult.”_ _

__“Maybe we should have ended this a long time ago,” she sighs, “Not because it’s not enough or because we should find other people but because… we could be in love, Gabriel.”_ _

__Now that she’s said it out loud, Kat realizes that what she has told him is the truth that has been uncomfortably coming to the surface. Not that she cares too much for him or that she’s been lying to herself about what he means to her, but the dawning realization that they would work as a real couple, that the care they have for each other and the attachment could easily weather the transition and endure._ _

__“Are you ending things or proposing to me, Kat?”_ _

__He puts his hand just above her knee, a familiar gesture that is an invitation, a provocation, and a comfort all in one._ _

__“I’m not sure. This isn’t a declaration of a decision, Gabriel. I’m just working through this and you asked.”_ _

__“You know, you might be the one person who thinks that our mutual potential to be in love with each other could be cause to stop sleeping together, right?”_ _

__“It’s not because it’s possible. It’s because we’re not going to choose it, not with both of us having bigger dreams. If we were going to, we would have done it already, instead of shying away from anything that would have made us choose.”_ _

__As she says it, she discovers that she believes it. If they wanted this, they could have made it happen a long time ago. It isn’t ignorance or fear that has kept them in a holding pattern. Well maybe there is an element of fear, fear of being tempted into a choice that they shouldn’t, one way or another._ _

__“And if I say that I don’t agree, if I say that I think all this mission proves an that we should say yes finally, to giving us a chance for something more.”_ _

__For a moment she imagines what it would be like, to do this all the time, apply for that special covert division she knows exists and play at being spies together permanently. They would be good at it. Would it feel like more or less of cheating if it were the norm instead of the exception? If it were something they did all the time, would it stop being fun?_ _

__She supposes it doesn’t matter. Neither of them wanted to work in the shadows. They have both worked too hard to achieve the opposite._ _

__“Be honest with us both. You can’t tell me you’d choose me over a ship, Gabriel. I don’t think you should but I think that’s why we will never be what we are playing at here.”_ _

__“Over a ship… Kat you know that’s not-”_ _

__He goes to pull back and she catches his hand between hers as it slips from her knee._ _

__“I wouldn’t ask you to. I won’t choose you either, not over the work I can do.”_ _

__“Does it have to be all or nothing?” he questions, reaching his free hand back towards her to brush a stray hair from the side of her face, “ Is what we have had so bad? Is there no middle ground between that and lines we both won’t cross?”_ _

__“No,” she shakes her head, “Maybe we will never choose being in love, but I do love you Gabriel, truly. I cherish what we have.”_ _

__There’s the distinction, between loving and being in love. Not one of degree but of perspective. To be in love is to be enveloped, consumed, contained by it. No, she is not in love with Gabriel, or this is not the conversation she would have chosen._ _

__“I have always loved you, Kat,” he says with complete committed assurance, raising the hand she is holding to his face to press a kiss against first one of her hands’ back side and then the other, “I just didn’t think we were talking about it.”_ _

__They had never talked about what they were or were not, never established ground rules… they’d lived by them nonetheless for over a decade. Those vague avoidant words at the start: _We good?_ responded to with _Yeah we’re good._ had served as a surprisingly binding contract for them both. It was fine. It was good. It was cool. _ _

__This… this is something beyond all those juvenile assurances._ _

__“We weren’t… We’ve both been very deliberate being close but not… romantic, up until now. To let our friendship remain spoken and everything beyond that unspoken. Maybe that’s a precaution we could have tossed out some time ago.”_ _

__“It feels good,” he agrees, letting their entwined hands fall between them and leaning back in towards her, free hand moving into her hair as he kisses her, “I know we aren’t going to settle down and set up house, but it feels right to say these things, to act like this.”_ _

__“It does,” she shudders a little in relief as she lets go of some of the tension she’s been holding, letting go of his hand and instead taking hold of his hips as she moves her thighs apart in order to guide him closer against her, “I don’t want to push this aside, Gabriel. I don’t want to tie our hands.”_ _

__“Then let’s not,” he murmurs, punctuating each word with another kiss, released hand holding one side of her waist as the other continues to run through her hair._ _

__In so many ways they have decided nothing, changed nothing. The difference perhaps is that their nonaction is a decision, a discussion this time. And perhaps, she recognizes, it will not be the last. As they have changed from the barely more than children they once were into adults with responsibilities, they will doubtless change again Kat believes though, she believes in the possibility of changing individually and with each other, without losing what is precious here._ _

__This is precious to her, but its not because of some unwritten boundaries or simple nostalgia. It’s because of who they are; it’s because of what they choose._ _

__She tips her head back, hips pressing forward against him with this arch, as he drags his mouth down her neck and past her clavicle. Sliding her hands up his back she anchors her grip at his shoulder blades, fingers digging in as he slides a hand up her thigh past where her nightgown has ridden up._ _

__“You know,” he whispers in her ear, breath sending tingles down her spine to meet the ones his hand is sending upwards, “On second thought, maybe exploring with some hand tying wouldn’t be such an unwelcome notion.”_ _

__“It is possible I’ve made a mistake encouraging you to do more talking here,” she teases back, reaching lower to tug his pajama pants down._ _

__“Maybe you’d better find a way to shut me up, then?”_ _

__“I already know several,” she retorts, right before she crushes her mouth into his, pressing her palms down into the counter so that she can lift herself just a little off the counter to ease his sliding her underwear off, “But I suppose if we try hard we might find more.”_ _

__“You know I relish new discoveries.”_ _

__They both do, even if Katrina’s tend to be conceptual in nature while Gabriel’s are more tangible. It’s just one more way they compliment each other. Maybe on some level that is why she put them in this position in the first place, even if it has been hard for her to admit to herself._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [ trekkerpoet29](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trekkerpoet29) for the timely beta and advice.


End file.
